


we might have a problem here

by and_hera



Series: hold me fast [1]
Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, no beta we die like men, sammy's canon typical depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26823673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/and_hera/pseuds/and_hera
Summary: “Uh, hi, King Falls!” Ben says, only a little awkwardly.“You talking to the tape recorder, Benny?” Lily asks, and scoffs. “Just so you know, they can’t hear you.”“Well, not yet they can’t,” Ben agrees, “but if this all goes well, we’ll be able to go back to the station, right? And it’s only fair that King Falls gets to hear how this all goes.”or, the one in which the world is ending and Emily Potter is trying to figure out how to fix it.
Relationships: Ben Arnold & Sammy Stevens, Ben Arnold/Emily Potter, Emily Potter & Lily Wright, Sammy Stevens/Jack Wright
Series: hold me fast [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1956505
Comments: 3
Kudos: 27





	we might have a problem here

**Author's Note:**

> HI EVERYONE!  
> i have been planning this story for like, several months now, so i'm DELIGHTED to finally post part one! i've been working to get this done before kfam comes back from hiatus, because this is how i think things are going to shake out post episode 100 :) i've been calling it my "fix-it before a fix-it is necessary" series.  
> anyway, these fics will come out (hopefully?) once a week/once every two weeks, depending on how busy i am. i hope you enjoy this as much as i do!

Shuffling. Someone bumps into a table corner and curses, loudly. Someone else curses at the other one for shouting, because _I have a headache, Lily, please just be nice for once, yeah_?

Click. Whirr.

“Uh, hi, King Falls!” Ben says, only a little awkwardly. 

“You talking to the tape recorder, Benny?” Lily asks, and scoffs. “Just so you know, they can’t hear you.”

“Well, not yet they can’t,” Ben agrees, “but if this all goes well, we’ll be able to go back to the station, right? And it’s only fair that King Falls gets to hear how this all goes.”

Emily shrugs. “It’s not a bad idea.”

“And I guess when we all die or turn into shadows, at least everyone’ll know what happened,” Sammy says wryly. “For the record, that was a joke.”

“Yeah, sure it was, Stevens,” Lily returns. 

“I’ve got a pass to be pessimistic right now, actually,” Sammy says. 

“He’s my brother,” Lily says.

“And my fiancé.”

“ _And_ ,” Emily says cheerfully, “alive. And we’re going to get him back. That’s the plan, right?”

Ben nods decisively. “We are. We’re going to get him back. Him and Mr. Sheffield, and hell, maybe Debbie, too. Everyone in the shadows.”

Lily sighs. “We know your ideal,” she says. “But what if it doesn’t go how you plan it, Benny dearest?”

“We can’t dwell on what-ifs right now,” he replies. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

“I’m glad we’re not live,” Sammy says. “This would make for some awful radio.”

Lily snorts. “Like you guys cared about the quality of your radio before… well. Before.”

“Before shadows poured from the board in Big Pine as Jack Wright spoke to us from the Void,” Sammy finishes.

“Yeah. that.”

“Guys,” Emily pleads. “We all know what happened.”

“Do we really, though?” Sammy asks. “Because, as far as I can tell, my fiancé-”

“Sammy.” Emily snaps her fingers, and he shuts up. She doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary when she snaps, she isn’t sure she would know how to, but no one knows what she _can_ do and the effect of it is _wonderful_. Being the One has its perks, she assumes. “Hey. This fucking _sucks_. But it’s been a day. We need to start thinking about what we’re going to do about it.”

Sammy sighs. Runs his hands through his hair, tugging on the knots at the ends. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to bring down the room-”

“Like you can bring it down farther than it already is,” Lily remarks. “We all know what you’re going through, Sammy. It’s fine.” She shrugs. “And we all know you’re prone to moping excessively, so it’s not like that’s a surprise.”

“I’m sorry for having depression,” Sammy says dryly. “I can’t help it.”

“Look,” Ben says, exasperated. He points at the tape recorder. “We’re recording this. We’re going to play these as soon as we know it’s safe to go back to the station.”

“So, never!” Lily says cheerfully. She leans into the tape recorder. “ _Fuck_. You can’t get me, FCC.”

“Hey, that rhymed,” Emily points out.

“Lily, you’re a menace,” Sammy says.

“ _The point is_ ,” Ben continues loudly, “that we should, I don’t know, do something significant while we’re recording. Work on the book.”

“You mean, the book that shadows poured out of and kinda summoned a demon?” Sammy asks, and he almost sounds like he’s genuinely asking.

“Oh, like you don’t have most of it memorized, Mr. _Repeats Passages Of The Secret Book We Legally Shouldn’t Have Live On The Radio_.”

Sammy flips him off. Ben makes a heart with his hands in reply. Lily groans. “If you’re done bickering like a married couple,” she says.

“Hey, I’m not the guy Sammy’s gonna marry,” Ben replies, throwing his hands up in surrender.

“Oh, great work, Arnold,” Lily says. “Now he’s yearning.”

“I am not yearning!” Sammy says indignantly.

Emily clears her throat. “Hey, Benny,” she says. “Didn’t you have a point?”

Ben shakes his head as if clearing out his thoughts. “Yes! Thank you, Emily.”

“No problem, sweetheart.”

“Anyway. Anyway! So.” Ben paces just a step back and forth as he talks. “The recorder is running, as we all know.”

Lily rolls her eyes. “Yes, you’ve made that much perfectly clear.”

“And we have most of the book memorized, right?”

Sammy nods slowly. “What are you getting at?” he asks. “Are we going to write it all down again? I feel like that’s just asking for more shadows to pour from the Void, or whatever.”

“Not what I mean,” Ben says. “You’re right. I’m not sure it would be smart. What I’m saying is that we need to do something about all of this. We need to remember the important parts and try and figure out what to do. We can’t just stay in this secret place until everyone’s dead.”

“What do you mean, ‘until everyone’s dead’,” Lily says cautiously. 

Sammy shakes his head. “You remember the book,” he says. “I know I thought I opened the door for a while, but- but this is really it. What Cecil did- this is _it_.”

Emily closes her eyes. She thinks about King Falls, pictures the streets and homes that she’s lived in for the past five years, she thinks, and then she _sees_ it. “Guys,” she says, “this isn’t good.”

“Emily?” Ben asks, and he sounds worried. “Em, what are you-”

“Shadows,” she says. Her mind is racing through the streets, the empty streets- they shouldn’t be empty, right? It’s the middle of the day, people should be out- and she sees everything. It's like she's running, and everything's black and gray but there are rainbow lights tinging the corners of the image, and Emily is _there_ , she _sees_ it. “There are shadows, everywhere. No one’s out of their houses, and there are- _things_ lurking in dark corners, oh my God-”

“Emily!” Ben says, and she opens her eyes.

Ben’s holding her cheeks, his face inches from hers. “Emily, your eyes,” he says. “They were- they were glowing?”

Lily says, “We might have a problem here." And Emily could not agree more.

* * *

Emily drove everyone from the station.

They were in Big Pine, so they were farther from any of the secret places than she would have liked, but Emily grew up here. She learned to drive on these streets and knows them far better than she knows King Falls, even after five years of living there. And it’s not like Sammy and Lily were in any state to drive, and Ben was back there with them, so it was up to Emily.

Emily, who was still in awe of what she did, what she saw. Somehow, she was sitting in her car, key in the ignition, ready to leave the Arnold-Stevens-Wright residence that was steadily growing darker- and also brighter?- behind, and then she looked at the dark light and she could _see_.

She wasn’t sure how the hell she did it, but she didn’t have time to process. All she could do was wipe the blood from her nose and drive to the station. All she could do was basically drag Sammy from his chair, from his Jack. All she could do was drive to the nearest secret place, the one in Sweetser Forest, and hope for the best.

She parked the car beside the little cabin in the woods and they all sat there for a moment, Emily in the driver’s seat and Ben, Sammy, and Lily all crammed in the back. Sammy and Lily were holding hands tighter than Emily has ever seen. Somehow, they still managed to make kindness painful.

“Alright, guys,” she said eventually. “Let’s go inside, okay? It’ll be much more comfortable.”

Ben nodded slowly, and he opened his door and slid out, pulling Lily who was sitting in the middle with him. Sammy stayed put for another beat before climbing out of his door, too.

The cabin was musty, and the least used of all the secret places. There were two small beds, one that always belonged to Ben and Emily and the other that Sammy and Lily fought over every time but always ended up sharing. Except this time, they didn’t fight. Sammy sat down and Lily sat with him.

As one would expect, Ben always kept a radio in all of their little hideouts. Just to see what would happen, Emily watched as he switched theirs on, the dial already tuned in to 660.

A Christmas song played. An older one, something about snow coming down and watching it fall. Emily heard the line “baby, please come home,” and then Sammy began to cry.

Somehow, all four of them ended up on Sammy’s cot, and they were all either crying or somewhere close to it. Because Emily has heard Jack’s voice before, of course she has, she was there for the Sammiversary, and she listened to Lily’s Wright On episode, but this was different. This was _Jack Wright_ , the man, the myth, the legend.

Emily wonders if Jack would have liked that. From what she knows about the guy, he loved ghost stories. She wonders if he would have liked becoming one.

But they were all on the cot, and it was creaking dangerously beneath them but no one cared, and Christmas music was still playing from the radio.

“No one’s there,” Ben said softly. “We left the place empty. Lily has the shift after us. No one should be in the station until after ten in the morning, and it’s barely five.”

“Jack Wright shouldn’t be calling into the station from who the fuck knows where,” Lily replied, aiming for fierce but ending up somewhere close to choked up. “I don’t think that matters much now. The door is _open_ , Ben. We’re supposed to be doing something about it.”

Emily said, “I think that right now we need to wait and see what’s going to happen. And I don’t think that any of us are in a state to go fight Shadows.”

Sammy was quiet, and he was shaking a little, and his hair had fallen out of his bun to hang around his shoulders. “That wasn’t him,” he said, which was good, because Emily was worried that he hadn’t realized. “How the hell are we supposed to get him back now? Something- some _one_ \- has his voice, or, or even worse, someone has _him_ , and what the hell are we supposed to do about it?”

“Whatever we can,” Ben said. 

* * *

“Run me through it again,” Emily says.

“Your eyes glowed,” Sammy says. “Like, bright white.”

“And your hands,” Ben says, almost reverently. “Your fingertips, they were all sorts of colors. Mostly bright.”

“It was real fucked up, Potter,” Lily says.

Emily nods, slowly. “Lily, do you remember if this is what happened when we were in the car?”

Lily shrugs. “Maybe? There was a _lot_ going on. I don’t remember if the light was coming from the house or from you or whatever. You know?”

“Yeah,” Emily agrees. “It was a lot. I’m just- I don’t know what’s happening to me, and I’m a little worried?”

“It takes a lot to get Emily Potter worried,” Sammy points out.

“It takes less than you might think,” Emily replies. “I’m just a lot better at hiding it.”

“Well, I know a thing or two about that,” Sammy says.

“Point is,” Ben says, “Emily’s dealing with like, the Unwritten One version of puberty, and now everything’s screwy.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Emily says under her breath.

“How do we fix it?” Lily asks.

Emily says, “I don’t think we fix it. I think I have to figure out how to control it.”

“Glowing hands. Glowing eyes. Muttering things about shadows roaming the streets.”

“I could _see_ it, Lily,” Emily says. She rubs her eyes, pushing her glasses up on her forehead. “I saw it all, saw the shadows in the streets. I don’t know what to do about it.”

“You know, when I moved here for this job, I didn’t expect the goddamn world to end,” Sammy says wryly.

Lily snaps, “you knew exactly what you were getting yourself into, Stevens. Don’t do that.”

“Hey,” Ben says firmly, “stop. We need a plan.”

And Emily wants to say something, wants to shout about how she doesn’t know what to do, about how she never asked to be someone whose eyes and hands glow, but here she is, and there isn’t much she can do about it now. Emily is the type to get frustrated and not say anything about it, and right now is no exception. So, she nods. “What can we do _right now_ ,” she says. “What’s our next step?”

Sammy shrugs helplessly. “Call Troy?”

“Are we safe to use phones?” Lily asks. “I mean, we can google and stuff, we tried that, but you know. The radio station. _Et cetera_.”

Ben nods. “Probably best to steer clear of phones, at least for now,” he says. “We can try and visit, maybe.”

“Maybe,” Emily agrees. “And I think I need to figure out… you know.” She gestures to her general self. “All this.”

Ben leans across the table they’re all sitting at, takes her hand. “I’ll help,” he says, and it’s sweet, because Ben is almost always sweet. Emily loves him. “And we need to remember _Death by Damnation_.”

Lily groans. “I _know_ you said we needed to memorize pages,” she says, “but I don’t know if I actually have them memorized. I just need you to know that.”

Ben furrows his brow. “Four copies,” he says. “One was lost in the library fire. One was Jack’s. One was ours. One is Beauregard’s. Sammy, you’re _sure_ you don’t know where Jack’s would be?”

Emily’s generally an observant person, and she notices that Sammy does this thing whenever Jack’s name is said, like a little shudder. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still there. “I don’t know,” he says helplessly. “I mean, maybe I didn’t know what it was and it’s still in the storage space I bought?” He shrugs.

“That’s a start,” Ben says. “It can’t hurt to check.”

“It _can_ hurt to waste time doing nothing,” Lily replies. “People are counting on us now, like it or not. We have to do _something_.”

Ben nods. Emily can see the gears turning in his mind. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.” He clicks his tongue twice, and then says, “here’s what I’ve got: two of us go to Sammy’s storage, see what we can find. The other two go to town and try to find Troy. I think Emily shouldn’t be going into King Falls, though, and I assume that Sammy will want to go through his own stuff, so. Lily, if you’re up for it?”

Lily sighs, and she nods. “Alright, Arnold,” she says. “I guess if we have to."

"When do we leave?" Sammy asks.

Emily says, "whenever we're ready."

* * *

Before they leave, Emily kisses Ben, because she can, and also because she wants to remind him that he needs to be safe. Lily and Sammy sort-of hug, a thing where neither of them want the other to think it’s a hug but they both want to hold onto each other. Emily squeezes Lily’s hand, and Ben and Sammy actually hug, and Emily wonders when they all got to be so close.

Probably when the world ended. That checks.

“Be safe,” she says to Lily and Ben.

And they’re off.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! please comment and kudos, and come talk to me on twitter @lcvelaces <3


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